A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  Leslie threw himself into his new role at the ABC and now, with a regular salary coming in, he and Coralie were able to buy a small car with a camping body and start procreating. On 30 August 1938 Megan Clarke Rees was born in the Saba Private Hospital at Neutral Bay Junction, an occasion my father remembered only too well.

  Shall I ever forget her arrival – me at home cleaning up and painting a pram that friends of ours had rescued from an old shed, my visiting mother complaining that I should have bought a new one, and then me passing out on the floor when the telephone at last told the news of a safe birth.

  When her firstborn arrived, Coralie – despite earlier misgivings – embraced motherhood. She recalled one evening, looking down at her sleeping daughter and feeling ‘such supreme happiness’.

  I felt that this was the fulfilment of my whole life. Although I’m very keen about my writing, my broadcasting, my travelling and all the other interesting experiences I’ve had, I would really give them all away – though I hope I don’t have to – for this one, this common experience that every woman who has a child can feel.

  At last there was progress on the writing front, too. My father’s play Lalor of Eureka won first prize in a national competition and was produced by the Melbourne New Theatre. My parents took their second Australian camping trip, parking the baby with my mother’s cousin Blanche and exploring Tasmania. Then, one Sunday evening, 3 September 1939, when both were taking part in a rehearsed reading of Eureka at the New Theatre in Sydney, world order collapsed.

  Just as one part ended, the newspaper boys down in Pitt Street were crying their wares – a special late edition of the Sunday papers. WAR DECLARED the boys intoned. BRITAIN HAS DECLARED WAR ON GERMANY.

  Of course, being part of the British Empire meant that Australia was also at war. But even though men and women enlisted in large numbers, the theatres of war must have seemed so very far away and in places so foreign that most people would have had to look at an atlas to find them. Where were Libya, Cyrenaica, Syria? It never occurred to anyone that conflicts would come anywhere near the southern continent. So my parents decided to press on with building their family. Six months after World War II began, I was also on the way.

  In September 1941 my parents took a trip to the Barrier Reef, leaving me (ten months) and my sister (three years) at home with our adult cousin Ailsa. This was the second time in Megan’s short life, the first in mine, that our parents had gone away, leaving us with kind relatives. It was the beginning of a pattern that would continue throughout our childhoods. However, that adventure resulted in my father’s first children’s book, and very successful it was. So no doubt they would have felt their absence justified.

  I was still a baby when the halcyon years ended, not just for my parents. All Australians were suddenly jolted out of their complacency. Those old enough to remember ‘the war to end all wars’ were frightened that the horrible experience, the chaos and waste of lives, was starting all over again. Those young enough to enlist had no idea what joining up would entail. They thought it would be an adventure. The country’s isolation became not a boon but a threat, the miles of crenellated coastline no longer a proud boast but a very real hazard. Australia’s population was only seven million, mostly scattered in the cities around the eastern and southern fringes of the continent.

  After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and declared war on Britain and the United States, the battle lines moved south. When Singapore fell, thousands of Australians were taken as prisoners of war. Then the Japanese established a major base in New Guinea, an Australian territory, meaning the enemy air force was now in comfortable flying range of the continent itself.

  Of course Australians had taken part in other conflicts. But they always happened overseas. It had been unthinkable that Australia would be attacked, but on 19 February 1942 two hundred and forty-two Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin, killing military personnel and civilians. Ships in Darwin Harbour were scuttled and flying boats bringing refugees from other countries shelled. My uncle Max, my mother’s younger brother, spent his twenty-first birthday burying the bodies that washed ashore. Japanese air attacks continued along the undefended coastline in the Northern Territory, far north Queensland and northern Western Australia. Indigenous people still lived their aeons-old traditional lifestyle in the remote regions of the north. To the south were thousands of square kilometres of desert and sparsely populated grazing lands, all remote and mainly inaccessible, making the southern cities particularly vulnerable to surprise air attack.

  Most of Australia’s available fighting force was engaged in overseas theatres of war. My father had not been called up. He was of the ‘tween wars’ generation: too young for World War I, too old for World War II. But he was requisitioned for duties as an air-raid warden and a precautions officer. There was a yellow metal sign with large black letters on our front gate: WARDEN. It had a contact phone number on it. As soon as darkness fell, Leslie was required to patrol the streets of our neighbourhood and make sure everyone had their lights low, blackout curtains drawn. During the day, he was at the ABC, which was striving to keep services going despite wartime austerities.

  But Sydney Harbour’s wide heads open to the Pacific Ocean made the city an easy target. Sydney would be the next port of call for the invading Japanese.

  Only a few months after the bombing of Darwin, three Japanese miniature submarines sleuthed their way through the heads. One mistakenly torpedoed the HMAS Kuttabul (a requisitioned ferry), with the loss of twenty-one sailors. Their sights had been fixed on two Allied warships anchored in the harbour but the subs were detected and fired upon. They were eventually scuttled by their own crews in an act of suicide.

  Sydney was a small city curving around a glittering harbour that, with criss-crossing ferries, was both a transport hub and a playground for weekend activities. So when the enemy came unbelievably close, slipping through the not-yet-completed anti-submarine barrier across the heads, my parents like all Sydneysiders would have been terrified. The rising slopes of the harbour and its bays were encrusted with houses and low-rise blocks of flats, the outer suburbs a development of the future. The Sydney Harbour Bridge had only been completed a decade before, linking the northern and southern shores.

  After the assault of the mini-subs, Japanese submarines began attacking merchant shipping in the waters off eastern Australia. Three ships were sunk, others attacked, the ports of Sydney and Newcastle bombarded. The climate of fear was escalating: the very real fear that Japan was about to invade Australia.

  I clearly remember the searchlights that criss-crossed the night skies over Sydney. These long trailing beams of light that were seeking out enemy aircraft seemed to us children something mysterious and other-worldly, the only illumination in the dark cavern of sky above the blacked-out city. Our windows were brown-papered over to prevent them shattering from bomb blasts or shelling. As soon as evening came, blackout curtains and blinds were drawn. It was advised that where possible, women and children should be evacuated to relatives and friends in safer places. We were among those in the city who had to take shelter when air-raid sirens sounded.

  There were two air-raid shelters in the garden of our Neutral Bay flats. They were dank rooms quarried out from under the two garages that opened onto the street. Because the land sloped down steeply, there was space for two roomy chambers with sandy floors, the sides substantial blocks of Hawkesbury sandstone. One of my earliest memories is of huddling in there by a dim light while the air-raid sirens screamed, my sister and I closely held by our mother, squashed in beside the other tenants of our building. Fear was written on the silent faces of our neighbours.

  Most families faced the loneliness of separation, either through having loved ones away in fighting zones or through evacuation. As the anxiety escalated, my mother, Megan and I were evacuated to the Blue Mountains to share a house with another family – friends of our parents with four children of the
ir own. After that we went to Young, a small country town 270 kilometres south-west of Sydney, to stay with my mother’s cousin Blanche Purchas and her family.

  In late 1942 my parents decided to risk taking us to Western Australia to meet our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. During the war, there was only one way to get across to the west – by merchant ship in a convoy escorted by naval vessels. I was too young to remember this trip but my parents later described how terrifying it was, fearing the ship would be torpedoed and us all blown to smithereens.

  It was during World War II that Coralie volunteered for the Women’s Land Army. It informed her ABC radio documentary, Land Army Ho!, broadcast nationally in 1945. In this work, she describes the shiver of panic that went through the country in 1942.

  Malaya was overrun by the Japanese, Singapore falls! Bombs over Darwin and Broome! The hordes of Nippon advancing on Australia and – so it seems – nothing to stop them. There was only one thought in all our minds – mobilise our manpower … the cry was all for guns, guns and men to man them. Recruit, recruit, call up for the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the munition factories, the Civil Construction Corps.

  The government propaganda that induced and sustained widespread fear led to men from all walks of life rushing to enlist or work in munitions. This included one-third of rural workers, which left farms struggling for lack of labour – even after bringing daughters home from boarding schools to work on the properties. But food production had to go on. It was desperately needed, not only in Australia but, as Coralie wrote, for further afield:

  […] for the men who are recapturing the oil fields of Borneo, for the men who are bombing Tokyo, for the sailors who are sweeping the Japanese from the Pacific, for the people of the British Isles with reduced ration cards, for the starving peoples of Europe who have been liberated from German guns […]

  The concept of a Women’s Land Army was raised by Mrs Aileen Lynch, head of a voluntary training organisation, and by September 1942 recruitment of women between sixteen and fifty years of age had begun. In New South Wales the recruits were trained on the job, picking and packing fruit and vegetables, planting and harvesting crops, raising poultry, shearing sheep, and even classing wool. In October 1944 the deputy director-general of manpower announced that volunteers were needed to harvest the cherry crop at Young and would be billeted in the showground. Coralie put up her hand. This was one of the rare times she went off adventuring on her own though it was to a place she already knew well.

  Meanwhile, in the city, conditions were spartan. Luxury goods were unobtainable and basics like petrol, clothing and food rationed. Every family was given a number of food coupons, depending on how many were to be fed. Tea, sugar, butter and meat – you had to produce your coupon book to purchase them. Milk and eggs were later added to the list.

  There was no refrigeration; the iceman delivered huge translucent cubes of ice every few days. My mother had a secret stock of a few tinned goods (camp pie, sardines, powdered milk) hidden away in a top shelf of the kitchen ‘for an emergency’. They loitered there until after the war when she decided to bring down a small can of Atlantic salmon for a treat. Alas, the tin had rusted beyond recognition.

  Obesity was not a health issue. Kids were skinny by default and childhood illnesses were rampant. Measles, mumps, chicken pox were inescapable – we had them all. ‘School sores’ (impetigo) were highly contagious and highly unattractive. Whooping cough and diphtheria were feared, infantile paralysis (later known as polio) a scourge. Children who contracted polio were placed in an ‘iron lung’ for months on end. There were no antibiotics, few patent medicines. Hot water and salt was a cure-all and Condy’s crystals, which turned water pink, could be gargled to avoid getting infantile paralysis (but don’t swallow!) or could be put on a snake bite in crystalline form to hopefully prevent death. Clothes and shoes were mended, not bought, and always passed down through the family. With an older sister, I could count on one hand the brand-new items of clothing I had as a child. My father had a bootmaker’s last he would set up on the kitchen table at night, repairing our shoes by gluing a black rubbery substance to the soles with Tarzan’s Grip.

  As children born into these conditions we absorbed the blackouts, the rationing, the limited resources, even the air-raid shelters as our normality. The worry and distress did not invade our small world, did not dent our wonder at the ribbons of light that criss-crossed the night skies, our excitement when we were packed off to the country. Megan and I were luckier than many of our age-mates who had absent fathers for their formative years, fathers who – if they did return – reappeared as strangers, immeasurably changed by their experiences.

  Strangely enough it was during this period of unimagined foreboding, of austerity, of isolation, that Leslie had his first three books accepted for publication. This despite the shortages of paper, ink and manpower.

  Coralie, meanwhile, wrote her book-length elegy and protest to war. It welled up out of the depths of her dismay and grief.

  15

  Two Writers – One Typewriter

  So I was born into a world at war. Nonetheless, ‘the race that stops a nation’ still took place. My mother said it worried her that she was in labour during the running of the Melbourne Cup. Were the medical team concentrating? Apparently they were, because she woke from a fog of anaesthesia to hear Dr Toohig say: ‘Another little girl, Mrs Rees. And this one’s like you.’ My official name was Stella Dymphna Clarke Rees, and I grew to be proud of it, that gift from my literary godmothers.

  Some forty years later my father was getting ready to publish his autobiography and asked me to restore the photographs he wanted included in it. At that time I lived with my own family on the steep side of Elvina Bay, a tiny water-access-only community on the western shores of Sydney’s Pittwater backed by the dark sandstone ridges and hidden streams of the Ku-ring-gai National Park.

  To do the photographic work I had to use an old shed which doubled as an outdoor laundry as my makeshift darkroom. Even with the heavy swathes of black cotton I strung over the window and door I couldn’t make it light-tight, so could only use it on moonless nights.

  My father would stand beside me in the red glow of the safety lamp, watching as each picture came out of the developing fluid. I was working on a tiny faded black-and-white print from our family photo album showing Miles Franklin in one of her flowery hats sitting beside my mother who was dandling a baby on her knee. Dymphna Cusack with her coronet plait was standing beside her. Although you could not see the baby’s face in the picture, I knew very well it was my sister Megan. But I had always wished it was me. After all, I was the one who inherited their names. So I pushed for a slight deception: ‘Dad, do you think we could cheat a bit with the caption for this one? Couldn’t we call it “Stella Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack with baby Stella Dymphna”?’ It is a measure of my father’s probity that he replied firmly, ‘No, we could not.’ And that was the end of that.

  Of course Miles would have nursed me as a baby and taken an interest in my progress. She had plenty of experience with youngsters, as the eldest of a large brood of siblings. My parents were among those she called ‘my congenials’ – those who were both friend and colleague in sharing her passionate crusade for an authentic Australian literature. Miles was more than a generation older than my father. He said she displayed ‘a motherly attitude’ towards him. In his autobiography, Hold Fast to Dreams, he describes one of his visits to ‘her little old-fashioned workman’s cottage’ in an outer Sydney suburb.

  Thinking of her (as most of us did) as an impoverished elder in need of all kinds of help, and gradually getting to know and like her, I volunteered to come to her home after ABC work and do odd garden jobs like digging out a tree stump and hacking firewood. Miles accepted. She cooked me a homely roast dinner with five vegetables and a cup of tea.

  On another of his visits, Miles showed some true country hospi
tality:

  As night drew on and conditions outside were cold and drear, with Coralie away in the country, Miles said ‘You’re not going home tonight.’ She then produced a pair of male pyjamas and led me to an old-fashioned double bed – while she retired elsewhere.

  I’ve always thought it an irony, one Miles would have appreciated, that with the exception of My Brilliant Career, a work she detested and which brought her much pain, her novels are rarely read. She is seldom acknowledged for the Brent of Bin Bin series or for her memoir Childhood at Brindabella: My first ten years (published posthumously) into which she poured her passion for the bush and its people. Instead, her name lives on for endowing Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.

  It is also a sad fact that Miles lived in penury, secretly scrimping and saving, a lonely and embittered woman during her last years and in failing health. Towards the end of her life she had moments of deep despair as this diary entry of January 1950 reveals:

  Feeling terribly discouraged & as if I had better give it all up & die. I’ve struggled so long for nothing – long enough to prove over & over again that I have no talent for writing. Could have made a success & helped my family if I had set to something else. There’s not a soul alive to whom I’m of any consequence, none to care a pin how soon I die. Failure & Desolation indeed.

  But I cannot rid my mind of the diary entry, one of her last, when she recorded she had nothing to eat and was feeling too weak to go out so she went into the garden and rescued a piece of bread her neighbour had thrown over the fence for the chooks.

  For Miles, Dymphna Cusack was more than one of her congenials – she valued her more like a literary daughter. For Dymphna, Miles was her dear friend and mentor. They were both novelists of the soil, Miles preoccupied with her deep experience of country living and Dymphna with a passion for social justice. Both were devout pilgrims in the quest for an Australian literature.